Substantive Perspectivism: An Essay on Philosophical Concern with Truth (Synthese Library, 344),Used

Product Description I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy after receiving BS in mathem ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidsons representative essays on truth and meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a series of lectures on the issue in Beijing (1988), which was cosponsored by my then institution (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Science). I have loved the issue both for its own sake (as one speci c major issue in the phil ophy of language and metaphysics) and for the sake of its signi cant involvement in many philosophical issues in different subjects of philosophy. Having been attracted to the analytic approach, I was then interested in looking at the issue both from the points of view of classical Chinese philosophy and Marxist philosophy, two major styles or frameworks of doing philosophy during that time in China, and from the point of view of contemporary analytic philosophy, which was then less recognized in the Chinese philosophical circle. Review ' 'Truth' is applied in so many ways, and in the light of so many philosophies, that one might suspect that no consensus is possible. Mou convinces me that this is false. His discussion brings together accounts of truth from widely divergent sources, and shows how to get them to talk to each other.'Adam Morton (Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and Decision Theory, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Canada) From the Back Cover This book is an inquiry into the philosophical concern with truth as one joint subject in philosophy of language and metaphysics and presents a theory of truth, substantive perspectivism (SP). Emphasizing our basic pretheoretic understanding of truth (i.e., what is captured by the axiomatic thesis of truth that the nature of truth consists in capturing the way things are), and in the deflationism vs. substantivism debate background, SP argues for the substantive nature of nonlinguistic truth and its notions indispensable substantive explanatory role, both of which are not only intrinsically beyond what the linguistic function of the truth predicate can tell but are fundamentally related to the raison dtre of the truth predicate. Taking a holistic approach, SP endeavors to do justice to various reasonable perspectives, which are somehow contained in many competing accounts of truth, through a coordinate system: SP interprets such perspectives as distinct but related perspectiveelaboration principles that distinctively (regarding distinct dimensions of the truth concern and/or for the sake of distinct purposes) elaborate, but are also unified by, the truth axiom thesis. To look at the issue from a broader vision, the book also takes a crosstradition approach exploring the relationship between Daoist thinking of truth and thinking about truth in analytic philosophy.This book will enhance our systematic understanding of the issue through its holistic approach, broaden our vision on the issue via its crosstradition approach, and enrich the conceptual and explanatory resources in treating the issue. The intended readership consists of researchers and graduate students. About the Author Bo Mou is Professor of Philosophy [effective in May 2009] and Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy at San Jose State University in California, USA. After receiving B.S. in mathematics, Mou obtained graduate degrees in philosophy from Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (M.A.) and from University of Rochester, USA (M.A. and Ph.D.). Mou was President (20025) of the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP). He has publ